Den of Lions.

Being held captive in a dangerous land or overcoming paralyzing injuries takes more than courage to endure. Terry Waite's Taken on Trust (Harcourt Brace, 370 pp., $24.95), Terry Anderson's Den of Lions (Crown, 356 pp., $25), and Dennis Byrd's Rise & Walk (HarperCollins, 258 pp., $20) are true stories of how faith pulled three men to freedom.

As a storytelling device, almost nothing is as surefire as the ordeal. Most of us love to read about someone caught up in the one-in-a-million set of circumstances that challenge human endurance and will beyond the breaking point--or almost so. We thrill when that individual manages to overcome all odds and pull through. And most of all, I suspect, we secretly like to imagine ourselves in the same kind of situation and wonder whether we would measure up to the task.

Three recent autobiographies deal with just this sort of challenge in ways that are different but nonetheless have a common thread: all three authors credit their faith, in large measure, for getting them through.

Two of these books have an even more common thread than that. Both were written by former hostages held by radical Muslim groups in Lebanon; what's more, their paths crossed in captivity and each appears in the other's book. But while their personal faiths helped both authors survive their ordeals, Taken on Trust by Terry Waite and Den of Lions by Terry Anderson tell their similar stories in markedly different ways.

Miraculous is the operative word most reporters have used to tell the story of Dennis Byrd, the defensive lineman of the New York Jets who not only survived a broken neck in a football game but also overcame his paralysis and was walking again in a few months.

In Rise & Walk, his personal account of the near tragedy, Byrd says the answer to his recovery isn't quite that simple--that it's really a "mixture of medicine and miracle, divine love and human faith." This is a touching story, one that far transcends the sports-book category.

Anderson and Waite have probably achieved the most notoriety of the many hostages taken during the madness that was Lebanon in the 1980s. Waite was already an internationally recognized figure when he was kidnapped in 1987, known, ironically, for his efforts to resolve earlier hostage situations. Anderson had been the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut, and following his capture in 1985, fellow journalists around the world saw to it that his name remained fixed in the public eye.

Anderson's tragic ordeal was longer--nearly seven years in captivity as opposed to four for Waite--but Waite's was harsher. Both endured conditions of unspeakable inhumanity, but for much of the time Anderson had the consolation of companionship with fellow hostages, occasional exercise, and often access to news of the outside world. Waite was alone, cut off from contact with others and deprived of any knowledge of world or family events.

Toward the end of Waite's captivity, he was placed in a cell adjoining that of Anderson and his companions, and it was there that Anderson--tapping out code messages on the wall--brought Waite up to date on all that happened during his long night. Anderson writes in Den of Lions:

It takes an agonizingly long time to

exchange any message what with

stops and starts, misspellings and

miscountings. My knuckles are al-

ready scraped raw from the con-

crete wall. But he obviously needs

this contact so badly, I can't stop.

Anderson was right on the money. Waite writes of Anderson in his own book: "I am eternally grateful to this man. He has provided a lifeline when I most needed it."

That's an emotional insight somewhat rare on the pages of Taken on Trust. Waite emerges, in his own words, as a man of reserve--a good man and without doubt a courageous one--but at the same time a person who appears uncomfortable in fully sharing his personality with his readers.

Waite achieved his prominence as a negotiator almost by accident. British-born Waite was raised in Cheshire, the son of a village policeman. After a regular army tour, he served for a time in the Church Army, an organization that performs social and mission work within the framework of the Church of England. That in turn led to other church assignments, each with increasing responsibilities, until he became a chief aide to the archbishop of Canterbury.

In the late 1970s, Church of England workers in Iran endured discrimination from that nation's radical Muslim elements, and some--falsely accused of being spies--were imprisoned at the same time that Americans in Iran were taken as hostages. Waite was dispatched to aid the Church of England captives, and his well-publicized successes as a negotiator led to requests for his aid in other hostage situations.

Thus he found himself in Beirut in 1985 conducting negotiations with shadowy figures in dangerous, hairraising circumstances hoping to free captive Americans (including Anderson) and other hostages. But the radical Muslims with whom he was dealing became increasingly suspicious and angry with Waite's Washington contacts--notably those with Lt. Col. Oliver North--and then finally came the moment Waite had feared: he was kidnapped and imprisoned himself.

Waite knew the risks and felt no regrets. But he quickly determined what had to be done:

My only chance of surviving what

is to come will be to develop an

inner strength. This I tell myself I

will do.

This was not easy, not for a moment. First there was the deadening routine to deal with:

Bread and cheese for break-

fast, one quick visit to the

bath room, and then 23

hours and 50 minutes ly-

ing in the corner with noth-

ing but my thoughts.

Nor were his thoughts easy to deal with:

I don't feel that God is near.

I don't feel comfort from

my prayers. All I feel is a

searching introspection, as

though a light were shin-

ing into the deepest parts

of my being ...

But Waite's faith was too sure to be submerged forever. Later on in his ordeal he writes:

On waking I say my prayers. I don't

make special pleas or ask favors.

As simply as I can, I try to enter into

the mystery that is God.

Unlike Waite, Anderson tells all--and there's a lot to tell. Not all of it is pretty, as he concedes at more than one point in Den of Lions (a phrase, by the way, from the Song of Solomon that refers to the land of Lebanon). But the ending is upbeat in more ways than one. Anderson's body endured his seven-year trial. But his spirit did more; it endured--and triumphed.

That's clear from the outset, as he indicates in the first of several poems that serve as chapter openers:

Wasted, empty years? Not quite.

No years are empty in a life; and

wasted--that depends on what is

made of them, and after.

Anderson would probably tell you that if there were wasted years in his life, they came long before his Lebanon captivity. Months before he was kidnapped, in fact, he began taking stock of his life and was less than happy with what he found. A former marine and Vietnam veteran, he was in terrible shape physically, burdened with alcohol-enhanced extra pounds. And although his professional reputation was top grade, he was unsatisfied in his personal life.

Raised a Catholic, he now called himself an agnostic, but even that was a dodge: "Just a lazy man's way of avoiding the question, avoiding the commitment called for." His first marriage had ended in divorce, and he desperately missed seeing his 8-year-old daughter. He was living with a Lebanese woman, Madeleine Bassil, who eventually became pregnant with his child.

For whatever reason, Anderson decided it was time to get things in order. He started exercising and reading the Bible. "I knew I was looking for something more than intellectual stimulation," he writes. "I just didn't know what."

A visit to a Catholic church during a holiday in Great Britain helped him decide what that something was:

I didn't pray, not really. But I felt a

perfect sense of being at home,

where I belonged. After so many

years of avoiding it, I recognized

myself: I'm a Catholic, a Christian.

Whatever I've done in the past, that's

what I am.

That was in December 1984. Three months later Anderson was kidnapped in broad daylight, beginning a grueling seven-year ordeal. His newly rediscovered faith would be put to a test far more severe than he could ever have imagined.

The details of the ordeal are spelled out in riveting detail. But so are the details of his spiritual growth, capped by the most moving scene in the book: Anderson's cell-block confession to his fellow hostage Father Jenco--a confession that ends with both penitent and confessor in tears. "In the name of a gentle, loving God," the priest tells him, "you are forgiven."

It's hard to say enough about Anderson or the story he tells in Den of Lions. Read it and see what I mean.

I also enjoyed Dennis Byrd's Rise & Walk--the title taken from Acts 3:1-8, in which Peter, invoking Jesus' name, cures the man who had been lame since birth. Byrd needed the same kind of cure after a crunching collision with a Jet teammate during a game in New Jersey's Giants Stadium against the Kansas City Chiefs in November 1992. Paralyzed immediately--and recognizing that fact right from the start--Byrd was whisked to Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital, where his miraculous recovery began. Byrd writes:

It was then and there that I found

the inner core of peace that would

see me through everything to come.

It was at that moment, en route to

the hospital, that I turned every-

thing over to the Lord, that I put it

all in His hands.

That kind of faith came naturally to Byrd, whose rural Oklahoma background included church three times a week and Bible stories every night. "Religion was woven into the texture of our everyday home life," he writes. And the page-by-page testimony to that fact in Rise & Walk clearly shows that it left a lasting impression.

Byrd's almost unbelievable recovery is well known to the public, but the faith that sustained him through it is less so. That's one reason I hope the book finds a wide audience. Those who read the book will find moving tributes to all who helped Byrd through his ordeal. Most moving of all, though, is his right-on acknowledgment of the role of faith in his life.

The book's final words tell it all:

That's the miracle. That's the magic.

It's knowing that all of life is a

blessing, that the Lord is with us

even if we falter, He is with us even

when we fail, He is with us when

we break, and He can help to make

us whole. I've always believed that.

And I always will.

A winner, too, this Dennis Byrd. And, in my book, an all-time, all-pro as well.